Cool Tools – PDA 2018

In this video, I share a recording of me drawing and explaining a sketchnote. Then, I’ll explain how I used the ELMO classroom camera to record the video.

I learned about sketchnotes from the @ONE Reflective Writing Club, which you can learn more about on the Online Network of Educators site for the California Community Colleges. This week’s prompt is to “share strategies for unplugging” because the more connected we get online, the more important it is to unplug to keep balance our lives. The creative challenge this week is to present our ideas in the form of a sketchnote, a method that combines traditional handwritten notes with drawings and symbols to create a map of ideas.

My strategies for unplugging aren’t hard for me to recall because, like most people, I need to remind myself every day to unplug at home—especially with young children.

First, I set aside a specific TIME to plug in at home. I check news, email, and Facebook in the hour after the kids go to bed and sometimes watch a little Netflix or Prime video, too.

I also set aside a PLACE for my phone (which is my primary mobile device) when I’m not using it. It’s in a central location where I can hear the phone ring and where I can charge it.

I’ve also included my FAMILY in my plan. The kids have designated days and times for using their tablet (mostly for playing Minecraft), and we stress that the tablet is be left in its resting place at all other times.

I’ve also organized lots of ALTERNATIVE activities – books, games, puzzles, and craft materials – that are easy to get to.

In my video, I show you how make a sketchnote video of your own. Many classrooms have an Elmo camera to project documents, and you can use it to create video! My colleague Andrea Chase demonstrates how to use it in the video (no transcript for this part).

For more instructional videos for the Elmo, go to YouTube and search for “ELMO Document Camera training video” to find the company’s playlist.

To learn more about sketchnotes, check out this sketchnote guide on the Jetpens.com website. It details the sketchnote process, basic elements of sketchingnoting, supplies, examples, and an interview with a pioneer of the sketchnote method.

Also go to Twitter and search for #SketchCUE challenge for more sketchnote examples. To follow the Reflective Writing Club, search for #CCCWrite.

Thanks for watching!

Liz du Plessis, Instructional Designer in Distance Education at Santa Rosa Junior College. This post is for #CCCWrite prompt 5.

I made a mistake last week that reminded me of my tendency to try and do it all by myself. My blunder also served as a reminder about the importance of inclusiveness in learning communities.

Last week was our college’s big Professional Development Activities (PDA) day for the semester, and I was booked to present sessions all day to an audience of faculty and staff. It was bad timing: I had a terrible head cold, and by the end of the day I lost my voice and had an earache from all the talking. 

I had wanted at least one of my sessions to be a more of discussion among faculty participants than a presentation. There was some discussion, but I mostly talked. And talked. And talked. I had set myself up for a long day of talking by preparing a lot of content, which I then felt compelled to present.

I’m an Instructional Designer, but I still need the reminder that an effective discussion has to be strategically planned and cultivated. My mistake last week recalled my early days of teaching History in which I did most of the talking and lecturing, and I didn’t expect students do to much of the heavy lifting during class. I learned over time that prompting learners–with careful scaffolding–to take on more responsibility not only supports more meaningful learning but also fuels their motivation to learn.

What’s more, I missed an opportunity at PDA to strengthen our Distance Education learning community.  It was a minor mistake, perhaps, but I’ve prioritized establishing a sense of community and inclusion among faculty who come to our workshops or complete our online teaching certificate. I somehow overlooked the importance of that at PDA, which is a real opportunity to reach new faculty.

Inclusion, connectedness, belonging, community — they’re so important to learning environments. The book Enhancing Adult Motivation to Learn: A Comprehensive Guide for Teaching All Adults (2017)–a classic reference on adult education that was recently updated for today’s learning environment–addresses the importance of inclusion to making learning relevant:

Inclusion is the awareness of adults that they are part of a learning environment in which they and their instructor are respected by and connected to one another (88)….In an inclusive and relevant learning environment, learners can act from their most vital selves and their curiosity can emerge (91).

Brené Brown defines “belonging” in The Gifts of Imperfection (2010) as “the innate human desire to be part of something larger than us.” This need has taken on a more personal meaning for me lately as I watch my 1st grader struggling at school. I recently found myself telling his principal and teacher that my concern at this point isn’t so much his academic progress but rather my sense that he feels left out or left behind at school–that he feels like he doesn’t belong.

I see myself veering off into another topic, so to bring it back to my original thought: let’s embrace more opportunities to create community-oriented learning environments. They support meaningful learning by fueling motivation, relevance, and peer-support networks that can endure beyond a single class or event. #CCCWrite

I will add a video version of this post for #CCCWrite once I recover from a heavy cold. : )

For a year after college, I worked at the PBS television station in St. Louis as the assistant to the Production Manager. I was surrounded by the latest technology but, aside from running the teleprompter on occasion, the equipment was mostly off limits to me. I sat at a desk outside the studio most days, scheduling production crews and feeling stymied as a budding journalist.

It was the year 2000. I had recently graduated from the University of Missouri’s School of Journalism where I had learned to produce professional-quality TV and radio news stories. I graduated with a fair amount of confidence in my writing and technical abilities, but I saw no clear path to a more challenging technical or creative position at PBS or beyond. Cameramen (who were, in fact, all men) worked on contract and struggled to make ends meet. More stable positions such as Video Editor or Producer required extensive professional experience, which I was not acquiring as an assistant. I felt stuck and soon went to grad school to study History, another passion.

Now, I wonder why I didn’t make low-tech stories of my own in my off-time. I assumed that there was no audience for the sorts of interview subjects that I knew, and I didn’t know how to go about selling my work as a freelancer or how to fully manage a website of my own. If easy blogging tools existed at the time, I didn’t know about them. In any case, I would have feared seeming amateurish without professional equipment and some sort of institution behind me.

In retrospect, the people I knew best in my hometown of Vandalia, Missouri, two hours outside of the city, needed someone to tell their stories. In 2001, the region was hit especially hard by the recession and still hasn’t fully recovered. I now observe the breakdown of civil discourse among hometown friends and family, mostly from a distance on Facebook. I wish I could make more of an impact, but I haven’t lived there for 23 years.

Now I feel more comfortable posting online and appreciate the value of showcasing the ideas of the people around me. As part of my job as the Instructional Designer at Santa Rosa Junior College, I interview faculty about their online teaching strategies and post the videos on my department’s DE Blog. I still get a little nervous that my quickly-made videos may seem unpolished, but I am trying to let go of my urge to edit out all imperfections. The more I strive for perfection, the fewer interviews I post. And perfection can backfire by intimidating others who might otherwise join the conversation.

Multimedia technology and online publishing have gotten so much easier and affordable in the past 20 years. Many of today’s students participate in online forums using multimedia, but I wonder if they – or their potential audiences – fully recognize the value of the stories around them.

How can we make the most of conferences? After the 2017 Online Teaching Conference (OTC) @cccotc, I made a highlights video that I posted on my department’s DE Blog and on Twitter. The conference energized and inspired me and I wanted to share the experience and ideas with others.

Thinking ahead to the 2018 OTC as a member of the OTC advisory group, I pitched a new idea: How about creating an OTC reading club to extend the conference experience beyond June? The plan (so far) is to share in advance of the conference a chapter or article written by the keynote speaker, who will participate in an OTC session to discuss the reading.

My latest idea: Post-conference, we could extend the discussion using an online annotation tool, such as Hypothes.is or Diigo, to further dig into the reading. The tools provide a way for a group of users to highlight and comment on any webpage or PDF. Users can also reply to each other to get a dialogue going about the shared text.

As I write this, it occurs to me that in my last blog post I questioned the use of text-heavy content in online learning. As far as I know, the annotation tools don’t have built-in video or audio recorders, so perhaps we could offer another discussion option using Flipgrid or VoiceThread — tools showcased in the upcoming CCC Digital Learning Day (#CCCDLDay).

And I’ll do another highlights video. It not only provides a way for me to share my conference experience but also helps me remember and reflect on it after my summer tan is gone.

Liz du Plessis is the Instructional Designer in Distance Education at Santa Rosa Junior College. This blog post is in response to Prompt #2 for #CCCWrite.

 

 

I’m Liz du Plessis, the Instructional Designer in Distance Education at Santa Rosa Junior College. This blog post is in response to Prompt #1 for #CCCWrite.

In the past, the students I struggled to relate to the most were those who resisted reading. Now that I’m facing some limits of my own, I can better relate to their challenges, both as a teacher and as a mom to a young learner struggling to read.

Ten years ago, when I started encountering more nontraditional college students in Indianapolis and Detroit as a History instructor than I had as a graduate teaching assistant at Indiana University-Bloomington, I was aware of some of the challenges they might face:  working a full-time job while in school, having children or other dependents, having little time to spend on campus, and so on.  I intentionally created homework activities that students could complete away from campus, such as conducting and presenting research online rather than requiring them to visit the campus library and print out paper submissions.

Those online assignments went well, but I continued to wonder how to get more students to complete the required weekly readings — a challenge not limited to nontraditional students but one that that I found myself thinking more about as I shifted my teaching methods to their needs. I personally had always made time in my life for reading and wanted my students to share that experience. In fact, I often lived to read in those days (before kids).

Now, as a working mom, I struggle to squeeze in reading, not only because I’m busier than ever but also because my tired eyes simply give out after a full day at the computer as an Instructional Designer. Even during my lunch break, it’s easier on my eyes — and more convenient — to grab my phone and watch an episode of Samantha Bee’s Full Frontal on YouTube than to hunt down and read the latest research articles in my field.

Must we insist that our students read those 20 to 30 pages a week (which was my typical expectation)? Or, as a matter of equity, should we provide meaningful alternatives that may better suit the needs and rhythms of their lives?

I’ve found that my spare time for reading now comes in 20- or 30-minute chunks when I’m on the move jogging or driving. Podcasts are now my favorite form of media for both pleasure (This America Life) and professional development (Teaching in Higher Ed). I have about an hour after my kids go to bed before my brain gives out and I’ve signed up for MOOCs through Berkeley and — quite honestly, to my surprise — enjoy watching video lectures, which are essentially talking heads, albeit brilliant heads. Ten years ago, I would have picked reading over watching videos hands down. Not now.

Another influence has been my son, who struggles with reading. In the evenings when it’s time for homework, he often moans “I’m TIRED” even though he still has plenty of energy to wrestle with his brother or play Minecraft. It turns out he has a visual tracking disability and is now receiving therapy. In retrospect, perhaps “I’m TIRED” really meant “my EYES are tired” or “my hands are tired of holding a pencil.” He loves games and multimedia, so I’ve started making him board games to practice ten-frames for math and videos with spelling words.

Of course, the challenge for instructors is to find time to create alternatives. And we need to get more comfortable with presenting less-than-perfect multimedia — a big challenge for me. So, in the spirit of letting go, I’ll record a quick video version of this post and try not to agonize over it…!

 

 

This is my brand new blog at Edublogs! I’m Liz du Plessis, the Instructional Designer in Distance Education at Santa Rosa Junior College (SRJC).

I’m exploring this blogging tool for my own blog as a participant in the @ONE Reflective Writing Club and for a broader purpose: as a possible collaborative teaching tool for SRJC instructors. I’m hoping the Edublogs tool will provide an easy way for a class to create multiple blogs in a single easy-to-navigate space. The verdict is still out — I’ll let you know in a future post what I think. Once I’m comfortable with Edublogs, I may ask faculty enrolled in my Online Teaching certificate course to try it out with me to see how it goes.

Exploring new tools can evoke a range of emotions in all of us, me included. I feel excited about the possibilities but a little overwhelmed at the thought of learning yet another seemingly intricate tool with limited time on my plate.  The one-tooth creature on this page expresses these divergent feelings for me: Is it screaming or singing? Or a little of both? What do you think?